Linux

Basically when Windows became pay-per-install. PCs stopped coming with an install CD so if you needed to reset from scratch you couldn't. I first tried Linux out of necessity because that was all I had to put on the machine in the house, and ended up never looking back.

I've played with it for a long time, but I still had a laptop that dual booted Windows. I upgraded the thing to Windows 10, and it became unusable. I went with disabling the anti-virus and firewall. Then I tried to update and the update service didn't work because it tries to go through the firewall service, which is disabled.

I forgot what I did to do that, so my system is essentially broken. I only used Linux on that laptop from then on and only installed Linux on my other machines

Never really have gone full Linux.

I run MacOS, Windows, Ubuntu, Fedora and BSD depending on the need of the box.

The one thing that lead me onto Linux, however, was the full hardware access in Docker.

It wasn't anything big that caused me to switch. It was just a general feeling of "oh, maybe I'll switch" and annoyance at Windows, and then I got a new SSD.

When Windows 10 came out, half of the Windows 7 system got borked. Mine was one of them.
The next day I flashed Ubuntu on a USB stick

Was curious about the increased customisation so I went dual boot around the time of windows 7.

Went full time Linux when windows 8 came out. Windows has only continued its enshitification since then, so it really paid off.

Every machine I'm currently running would run like dog shit with windows, but runs like brand new with Linux Mint.

Windows was actually quite good when I made the swap. It was during the height of windows xp.

I did it because I am a curious guy, and wanted to know what it was all about. I've been full-time and had fun with it since then. :)

Wanted to hack WiFi when i was teenager, right now already close to decade of daily driving linux

Windows update would always start doing stuff whenever I turned on my PC and would slow it down to a laggy crawl until it finished. This increased the pressing the power button to doing what I need to do time to 15 minutes.

I knew that Linux updates worked differently so I tried it out. And I was right. Oh so right

I was dual booting Linux and Windows 10 like 4 years ago, and then Windows somehow got rid of GRUB entirely, pissed me off enough to remove Windows, haven't used it on a personal computer since then.

When I was a kid, windows XP was having stability issues and I wanted to play minecraft. Switched to Linux and had no issues.

gamescope

I'd used Linux a bit out of curiosity in the Windows XP era

Windows Vista came out and was completely unusable on the computers I or anyone around me owned. It was also harder to configure than Linux and the new UI looked worse than the Linux UIs at the time

So I switched and haven't been back to Windows since

Been meaning to make the switch for years now. Was going to do it before Windows 11 either way. Second full screen popup telling me I should switch to Windows 11 I downloaded an ISO, put it on a USB and haven't looked back. NVMe made it that much faster.

I've been playing with Linux distros for over 25 years now. I can't recall what made me go exclusively to Linux,but it had to do with me wanting more control over my devices. I remember that I ended up killing Windows entirely after dual booting 7 (I did not want to move to Windows 10 and EOL for 7 was rapidly approaching) with Linux Mint in 2019 on an Alienware laptop. I started running as much software as I could on Mint, getting to learn LibreOffice pretty well, but I still had to keep a VM for work, as the in-house platform was Windows only.

About 3 years ago my company accepted to provide me with a Windows 365 cloud computer, and I've been solidly using Linux exclusively since then (except for work, but that's going away too as the new platform is fully Web based).

Truth is that I never liked Windows because it's and incredibly intrusive OS, so I have not missed it one bit.

It's just that i wanna learn more about computers. At the time with Windows I didn't think i could really understand what is going on behind the scene. It hides too much stuff from the users and there was a weird idea in my head that the advanced use of computers is supposed to be in the command line, Windows just doesn't seem to be the right choice. I don't play much games or even heavily use computers in general, so my laptop basically became a big toy for me to tinker with.

I was always interested in computer programming, and was doing so much in WSL and several VMs that I installed Cygwin. I was then like, “What the heck! If I want a Unix terminal, I might as well use Linux.”

when I realized my hardware no longer worked for me it worked for microsoft and dell and hp etc. I was done.

Nothing really, I started dual-booting and jumped from one to the other depending on what I wanted to do. One day I realized I hadn't booted in Windows for months and had never needed it, so I just got rid of it.

I think it was around the time of the windows 10 beta, I was trying that out and also dual booting with Linux mint.

I remember being a little frustrated with getting games to work great on Linux, but even more frustrated just using Windows. So I thought "Linux makes me less mad, I'm just going to use that"

I'm still on Windows 10, mainly for gaming. I probably won't switch (to PopOS or Mint) until Win10 EOL happens, primarily for gaming-related reasons.

I have an Nvidia card and can't afford to get an AMD, and most of my games are not on Steam (I really like GOG), so I'm hoping by that point Nvidia compatibility will have improved enough compared to last time I tried switching.

I mean FFS I went to PopOS like a year ago and couldn't even get Dragon Age: Origins to run, even through Lutris. It made me sad. :(

I’ve been using and working with Linux since 1999 (big box Redhat 5.1). It was a hobby at first, but then it became a tool in almost every job I’ve held.

Now, on my personal PC I’ve bounced between windows and Linux (and some mad attempts at hackintoshing) since 1999.

But Windows Recall changed that.

Microsoft is doing what they’ve always done — try to control everything under the guise of “this is what the user wants” when not one damn person said “oh I want my operating system to take screenshots of everything I’m doing, AI-analyze them, store the data in an insecure database, and trust that Microsoft will never phone home about any of this”

So now I run Linux full time at home and all the games I play and want to play work perfectly fine.